The Book of Antopol (or, Can We Ever Know the Past?)

In December, 2000, I was living in Israel after graduating from college and wound up at a friend of a friend’s holiday party, in Haifa. I knew no one but the girl who had brought me, and, after a few minutes skulking alone by the dessert table, I ducked into the kitchen and asked an elderly woman at the sink if I could help, just to have something to do. She handed me a dish towel. She was short and wiry, with dyed red hair and skin so pale you could see the whole veiny design of her interior. It took less than a minute of chatting in Hebrew for her to tell that I wasn’t Israeli, and she asked where I was from. I told her America. “No,” she said, eying me more closely. “Where are you from?”

I said that my family was originally from a tiny village called Antopol, a few hours from Minsk, in Belarus. “But no one’s heard of it,” I said. “You can’t even find it on a map.”

She set down the bowl she was washing and stared at me, as if really noticing me for the first time. Then she said, “I’m from Antopol.”

I come from a big family of storytellers, and, growing up, I liked hearing about the years before I was born. The battered VW van my parents lived in as they drove cross-country, named Blue, after the Joni Mitchell album; the stories of the generation before them; the two F.B.I. men my grandfather, an active Communist, claimed he could hear coming up the lawn every night during dinner, even before they knocked—always the same two agents in stiff brown suits, asking if he had a minute to talk.

And, before that, tales about my great-grandmother Molly from Antopol. She’d been the oldest in her family and had left her siblings behind, promising to send for them when she had enough money saved (she never did). She lived in a boarding house in Queens with other immigrant girls, run by a distant cousin who turned it into a sweatshop during the day and put Molly to work.

But that was it. I knew nothing of where Molly was really from. That part of Europe, that part of history, was a topic no one went near, as if the tales were too dark for even my funniest relatives to twist into anecdotes. I knew not to ask. And maybe they didn’t have answers. I’d spent years trying to summon an image of that time and place, but everything I imagined—the village; the people; the stark, icy landscape—felt so fake and cinematic that I could almost hear accordions playing in the background. I could see the grainy, black-and-white reel of Cossacks on horseback, charging through the village square. I could see Molly’s seasick journey to the States: the Manhattan backdrop glittering in the distance, so miniature and grand, and a cast of weary, dark-haired Belarusian beauties stumbling into line at the immigration port.

* * *

But there, in that kitchen in Haifa, I heard about Antopol. The woman had been young when Molly left, and barely remembered her, but she had other stories. She told me about Rabbi Binyamin and Yossl the tailor, about the businesses along Pinsker Street, the butcher and the pub and the bakery. She talked with her hands, her eyes. Her tales of village raids, of famines, of a neighbor’s newborn given as a “gift” to a barren Gentile woman were recounted with the same animation as anecdotes about languid summers swimming in the Karolevski Canal as a girl, as if she’d gone over these stories so many times that even the most horrible ones had become only that to her: stories.

But, when I told her that I hoped to travel to Antopol one day, she took a long breath. “There’s nothing to see,” she said. “After the war there were three Jews who went back to Antopol.” She was looking right past me, as if snapshots of that gutted village were appearing on the blank kitchen wall. In the other room, I could hear the party carrying on, a piano playing, the high ring of laughter. “And, one by one, all three of them left,” she continued. Then she leaned in close and told me to find her son in Tel Aviv. “He has a book about Antopol. A memorial.”

And so the following morning I found myself back in rainy Tel Aviv on the Dan bus, headed toward his apartment. The man resembled his mother, skinny and small with sleepy brown eyes, but he seemed more typically Israeli than she, loud and boisterous, forcing a snack on me before escorting me out the door with my own copy of the Antopol book. It was enormous—the size of three or four yearbooks put together—with passages written in Yiddish, Hebrew, and English. Its cover was plain, cream-colored with the village name in black block letters—but the careful binding and the thickness of the pages showed that tremendous care had gone into assembling it. The woman’s son had explained to me that the book was meant to serve as both an oral history of Antopol and a gravestone for all those villagers killed in the Second World War who never got one. He told me that hundreds of books like this—yizker-bikher, in Yiddish—had been created to commemorate Eastern European Jewish communities decimated in the Holocaust. Chapters included an academic discussion of the village’s economy, geography, and years under the thumb of the Russians, the Poles, and the Germans—but following an account of a particularly harrowing and bloody raid by the Belachovitz soldiers, for example, was a section, just as long and detailed, about a building in need of roof repair.

Among my favorites was the “Personalities” chapter, in which people now living in Israel or North America sent in remembrances about their years in Antopol, or updates on their current lives. Many of the entries felt as scripted as an alumni newsletter: so-and-so lives in Toronto with his beautiful wife, and his four spectacular children, all lawyers, have gone on to bring him nine wonderful grandchildren; so-and-so was a successful plastic surgeon in White Plains before retiring to Miami. One man was still upset that seventy years ago, in Antopol, someone had stolen his cow. It was extraordinary, hearing so many voices at once: some people still stuck in the past, some unwilling to mention it. I felt, reading that book, as if all my life I thought I’d lived on the quietest, most desolate street and then one day the sun came out and everyone flung open their doors, sat down on their stoops, and spilled their guts.

In the end, perhaps what fascinated me most were accounts of the village’s partisan fighters, teen-agers who escaped the ghettos during the Second World War and joined underground resistance movements in the forests surrounding Antopol. Growing up in the States, I’d known very little about the partisans. But in Israel, among tales of the camps and the ghettos, there existed another essential narrative: a heroic story of Jews fighting back. To the Russian and Chechen kids I worked with that year in an immigrant-absorption center, the Lithuanian partisan poet Abba Kovner, who went on to live in Israel, was a national treasure, whereas in America I hadn’t even heard of Tuvia and Zus Bielski, two of the most famous partisans who immigrated to the States. For so many years I had wondered about my relatives who had stayed in Antopol, and about the friends and neighbors Molly had also left behind when she boarded that ship in 1910. The more I read, the more I tried to imagine their lives, before and during the war, and their deaths—and what of those three people I’d heard about from the woman in Haifa, the ones who went home in 1945 only to realize there was no home?

With the Antopol book, that distant, unknowable place finally came alive to me: something sealed had cracked open, and I could finally peer inside. That was the year I started writing stories, many inspired by my family history: the garment-worker strikes of the nineteen-twenties, the Red Scare of the fifties, the liberalism of the seventies. There was a used bookstore on Allenby Street in Tel Aviv, hidden behind an electronics-repair shop and a Sephardic luncheonette, and it had a seemingly endless section on Jewish history. Every couple of days I’d stop in after work and pick up new books, searching for every memoir and biography I could find about the region near Antopol—until finally one day the owner, a large, balding man in clothes so rumpled he reminded me of an overstuffed drawer, looked up from behind the cash register and said he had never, in his entire life, met a person with more depressing taste in books.

* * *

I wish I could report that I finished this new stack of books with a sharp and nuanced picture of Antopol. That I finally felt I’d gained the knowledge and authority to write about that faraway place and time, that on weekends I took the bus up to Haifa to visit the elderly lady, and that we sat in her sunny kitchen on Mount Carmel staring out at the Mediterranean, swapping stories over mugs of tea. But I never heard from her again.

The Antopol book was so enormous, so detailed, containing such a variety of voices that I had wanted to believe it was a pillar of fact. But the more I read other books, the more my doubts grew: these books were flush with inconsistencies. A dozen memoirs and biographies on partisan life near Antopol and, still, I had questions. One person would recount subsisting solely on blackberries and mushrooms in the encampment they set up in the forest. Another person, living in the same forest during the same chilly autumn and brutal winter, described the weekly village raids: pillaging bread from peasants’ kitchens, livestock from their farms, potatoes and turnips and onions from their gardens, all cooked over a fire in their makeshift outdoor kitchen. One writer mentioned the grab bag of weapons that he and his partisan brigade stole from peasants. Another writer, again living in the same forest during the same time, described the one snub-nosed revolver that the brigade gingerly passed around, and the spent bullets they pried from the forest floor to reuse again and again. Yet another person described missions to blow up S.S. supply depots and military rail routes, armed with thin branches that, in the moonlight, could pass as rifles.

I’ve never believed it’s a fiction writer’s job to create an exact replica of the past, a diorama the reader can step right into. But it is my responsibility to learn everything of the world I’m writing about, to become an expert in the politics and history that formed my characters’ identities. But certain details refuse to add up, and despite intensive research I remain uncertain as to where the truth actually resides. I still don’t know how I’ll ever glean facts about a village where there’s no one left to answer my questions.

“Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original … it is a continuing act of creation,” Rosalind Cartwright once wrote, and whenever I think of those words I envision all those partisans from Belarus who chose to relive some of the darkest moments in their lives for the sake of a book. I can’t believe it crossed any of their minds that one day, more than seventy years after the war ended and they left the woods, an American writer would be comparing details from one book against another, neurotically worrying whether blackberries really grew rampant in the Polesia forest in the autumn of 1942. Rather, I imagine that by writing these books (or allowing biographers to write about them) they were attempting to make sense out of a harrowing history, trying to shape and control it through language. It is important to focus on the blackberries. But where those facts don’t jibe, I try to get at deep, emotional truths of my characters. Whether they ate blackberries or turnips, carried pistols, rifles, or sticks, they were living, hunted, in a freezing forest with no anchor to the lives they had once known. What must that have felt like? What must that do to a person—both there, in the forest, and, for the lucky ones, when they trudged out, filthy, bone thin, and exhausted?

I’ve heard writers talk about receiving a story as a gift—it arrives in their heads fully formed and all they have to do is transcribe. That’s never happened to me. I’m glad for that. I like that it’s challenging—that when I’m writing, I feel as if I’m pouring everything I have into the story, until there’s nothing left and I have to begin thinking about a new world and set of circumstances to research and explore. Still, there are moments when, after establishing the facts and squeezing them like fruit for they truths they contain, I’m left feeling just as curious as I did when I began.

I called my grandmother the other day. My grandfather’s been dead for decades; she’s remarried now and lives in Leisure World in California. She hadn’t been a Communist herself, and I’ve always wondered how much of his politics my grandfather shared with her. I wanted to know about the F.B.I. guys. “Oh honey, I don’t remember,” she said. “It was so long ago.” I could see her as clearly as if she were standing before me: straightening up her spotless kitchen, in khaki slacks and a bright button-down, the phone cord stretched tight. “Yes, they’d always come right when I’d put food on the table. Your grandfather would open the door, then it shut right it in the agents’ faces. He’d sit back down in his chair and all the kids would go silent. I’d say, ‘Moisch, what’s wrong,’ and over and over he’d tell me everything was fine, that I had nothing to worry about and should just enjoy my dinner.”

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